Dogecoin Mining & Fee Market Update — September 28–October 4, 2026

1. The week on the tape

DOGE closed the week at $0.09592, down 1.0% (Oct 4 vs Sep 27), with the week's high at $0.0981 (Sep 30 intraday) and its low at $0.09033 (Oct 2 intraday). For miners, the week was almost entirely a security-margin story wearing a flat-price mask. The DOGE-denominated subsidy is fixed, so a 1.0% price dip trimmed the dollar value of every block by almost exactly 1.0%, from ~$1.32M to ~$1.31M per day across the network. The headline was not the price — it was hashrate and difficulty falling roughly 28% before a sharp rebound, a move an order of magnitude larger than the 1.0% the tape delivered. We restate the standing point plainly, as every edition does: a miner's dollar revenue this week moved with price, not with fees, not with usage — and this week price barely moved while the security layer underneath it did.

Context against the nine weeks we track: the two-week uptrend is over. After W38 (+6.0%) and W39 (+11.0%) printed the first back-to-back green weeks of the dataset, W40's −1.0% leaves the close at $0.09592 — 1.0% below the W39 pivot of $0.0969, and 4.1% below the $0.10 line one September Tuesday closed above. For a miner the macro point is unchanged: the subsidy's dollar value fell because price did, not because anything in the mining model moved. But the security margin did move — which is this week's subject.

2. Hashrate and difficulty

The security layer had its most volatile week in our records, and this edition measures it entirely inside the report's window. Difficulty is the primary series, because it retargets every block (DigiShield) — the September 28 blocks alone ranged from 26.80M to 70.15M within one day, so a single point-in-time print is a coin toss. The series we can verify block by block is the difficulty of the last block of each day:

Three observations. First, magnitude: a day-end drawdown of 28.0% at the trough and 18.2% at the week's close, on a price that fell 1.0% — the security margin moved by an order of magnitude more than the market. Second, direction: the week ends with two consecutive rebound prints (October 3 and 4), lifting the day-end print +13.7% off the trough — the return leg has started inside the window, though on two prints it is young. Third, what did not move: the chain produced 1,363 blocks a day, an implied block time of 63.4 seconds against the 60-second target, essentially unchanged from last week's 63.5 — the clock held while the margin underneath it compressed. In the data report this trips the security-budget check at fourteen times its threshold; the mechanics are this week's deep dive.

One method note we repeat because it matters: cross-provider hashrate estimates for Dogecoin differ materially because of merge-mining attribution, and this edition's hashrate figure is derived, not sampled — day-end difficulty multiplied by 2³², divided by the average block time. Applied to the September 28 snapshot difficulty (56.11M), the formula yields 3.80 PH/s against the explorer's own published 3.83 — a 1% difference — so the derivation reproduces the snapshot's methodology; applied to the day-end prints it yields a hashrate path whose every input sits inside the report's window and is individually checkable on Blockchair's block explorer.

3. Miner revenue: the subsidy math

Gross miner revenue ran at approximately $1.31M per day, essentially all of it block subsidy: about 13.63M DOGE issued daily (1,363 observed blocks × 10,000 DOGE), worth that amount at the $0.09592 weekly close. The design behind the number defines everything else in this report. Dogecoin issues roughly 4.97 billion DOGE per year — about 3.18% supply inflation against 156.19B outstanding — with no maximum supply and no halvings. Annualized, the subsidy is worth on the order of $477M at the weekly close, down from $481M last week on price alone.

4. The fee ledger

Fees remain a footnote — deliberately, and this edition measures them entirely inside the window. The fee ledger switches here from the explorer's point-in-time median print to CoinMetrics' daily total fees (FeeTotNtv), checkable for every day of the report's window: miners collected about 8,086 DOGE per day in fees, an average of 0.4527 DOGE (~$0.0434) per transfer at the week's activity — up 14.3% per transfer from the prior week's 0.3962 computed the same way, even as total fee income fell about 18% in dollar terms (roughly $760 per day against $931) because transactions collapsed 25.9%. Averages run above the median prints of prior editions because the fee distribution is skewed; the caliber is now consistent week to week. There was no congestion: the block clock never filled, averaging 1,363 blocks a day at 63.4 seconds against the 60-second target. Per-transfer drift on shrinking usage is transaction mix, not a fee-market shift; if congestion ever arrives, it shows up in the clock first.

5. Revenue per unit of hashrate

Miners compete for a fixed daily reward, so the number that actually describes mining economics is revenue per unit of hash. Take the week's $1.31M of daily issuance and divide it by the ~2.23 PH/s implied by the October 4 day-end difficulty: roughly $587,000 of subsidy revenue per PH/s per day, or about $214M per PH/s annualised — up from ~$485,000 and ~$177M a week earlier on the same implied caliber (last week's edition quoted $345,000 on the explorer-snapshot caliber; the pool did not change, the denominator's measurement did). A flat price with a quarter less hash at the trough is, arithmetically, a raise for the operators who stayed. That is the pool every operator is competing for.

The standing warnings apply. The implied hashrate moves with the day-end difficulty and the week's block time, and per-block retargeting makes day-end prints jittery — the trough day implied ~1.96 PH/s, the week's close ~2.23 — so the per-PH/s figure is a window read, not a precision instrument. And because the reward is fixed in DOGE while hash is shared with Litecoin, the per-PH/s pool compresses the moment new hash arrives — which is why a flat-price week with departing hash, like this one, raises the pool for the operators who stayed, until the hash returns.

6. The subsidy clock: 1,363 of a nominal 1,440

The quietest source of error in Dogecoin miner math gets its standing section. The network is designed to produce 1,440 blocks a day — one every 60 seconds — which would mean exactly 14.40M DOGE of daily issuance. The chain actually produced 1,363 blocks a day across September 28–October 4, or 13.63M DOGE: 94.6% of the nominal subsidy, with an implied block time of 63.4 seconds.

The supply series confirms the arithmetic to the coin: CoinMetrics puts supply at 156,190,892,866 DOGE at the window's end, an increase of exactly 95.38 million DOGE — 9,538 blocks × 10,000 = the same 95.38M. We cross-checked the block count independently against the chain: Blockchair's day-end block heights run 6,392,301 (September 27) to 6,401,839 (October 4) — a difference of 9,538. Two sources, one number.

7. What stays removed: the pool table

The pool-share table remains removed, for the same reason given when it was pulled: we cannot verify pool hash distribution from a source we trust at the time of writing, and an estimated table we cannot reproduce fails this site's standard. Rather than substitute a different guess, we publish the gap. If a verifiable pool-share source returns, the table returns with it. The structural point stands without percentages: Dogecoin is merge-mined with Litecoin, so its security pool is shared, and concentration among a few large operators remains the known structural risk to watch — a fact we will quantify the day we can source it.

8. What a DOGE fee buys — and the cheaper rail

Dollar for dollar, Dogecoin remains one of the cheapest transfers in crypto: an average fee of about $0.0434 (CoinMetrics FeeTotNtv ÷ transactions, this week) to move value in roughly a minute. The honest comparison for stablecoin movers is against TRON, where a USDT transfer costs about $0.20 in TRX bandwidth when paid directly — or about $0.02 using rented energy:

That roughly 90% saving on TRON is the entire proposition behind Tronsell's energy rental — same transfer, same finality, a fraction of the cost. We publish the comparison because a fee report that only quotes one chain is marketing, not data.

9. Week 40 miner scorecard

10. Outlook: three dated markers

October 14: Bitwise's BWOW ceases trading, shrinking the DOGE ETF complex from three funds to two — a mechanical, dated change with a mining-side footnote: if the late-September flow strength partly reflected positioning ahead of that delisting, the post-October-14 flow series is the clean read. The next difficulty retarget path: after the week's −18.2% w/w and the two rebound prints that closed it (+13.7% off the trough), the open question is whether day-end difficulty reclaims 40.20M (the September 27 level) — if it does, the exodus was transient; if a new day-end low prints under 28.93M, the watchlist downgrades. Fourth quarter 2026: the Federal Reserve has two meetings left and a dot plot implying one more hike; a second hike is the likeliest macro test of the new $0.090–$0.097 range. We will report the number, not the mood.

One forward-looking framing from coverage worth logging for later grading: the week's daily issuance ($1.31M) still exceeds the ETF complex's best single day this period — new supply versus the demand line the funds represent is a ratio checkable every week, and this week it read: supply wins.